Filtering by Tag: NaBloPoMo

Well, thank you for joining me this November, I'm sorry I blew it and didn't post every day but honestly, I have nothing to prove anymore. I've finished NaBlo a whole bunch of times, I deserve a few weekends off.
This drawing was requested by a friend who asked me to draw something his wife would like, and at the risk of spoiling the surprise -- I am sending time-space brainwaves so she won't check here until after her drawing comes in the mail -- I went ahead and made this:

I like how the bear is trying to swat at the bird holding up the banner. The bear has no respect for symmetry, or for how much work it is for wee little birds to flap like hell to keep that banner up in the air. Bears just think they own everything!

(I'll continue posting weekdays for at least another month as I really, really want to get these all done before Xmas.)

The Hodgman-Bamford illustration drama continues, and I'm throwing in the towel. I need to spend some time learning to draw faces and I think that can only be done with a pencil, I am really not ready for ink in this regard. Below is my second try at imagining an exchange between these two cultural treasures, based on the only Twitter interaction I could find for them.

If you look at Maria Bamford's Twitter avatar, you'll see that the expression on her face while lying on the sidewalk being licked by two dogs is one of delighted disgust. I have only managed to place a look of calm and trust on her face, which was not what I was going for. Hodgman's avatar comes a little closer to capturing the original, mostly because it's glasses-and-mustache based, and it was easy to sketch the little peacock in the back. Peacocks are a snap compared to complex human facial expressions.

This last one is supposed to be "a very old tree man" but I couldn't resist putting a crow in there, too.

I was exiled from the living room the other day because Jack and Jackson were in the midst of a Game of Thrones marathon, so I sat at my little desk in the kitchen and copied the bear from a bookmark* I'd found at work.

Someone suggested that this is how California got its shape, a bear hugged it so hard that it bent. This is a plausible mythology, and I like it. I also like how the bear is licking its own fur because it seems like Bear Behavior to lick yourself for a few moments between the time you capture something and the time that you eat it. Like, a bear needs to settle itself down a little before digging in and consuming your heart and lungs. The bear loves you so much it eats your heart first. "California, I've got you!" growls the bear, and the bear has a whisper of love in its voice. The bear wants you inside where you can be a part of the bear and never get away.

*People leave bookmarks in library books all the time. We frequently find family photos, greeting cards (both blank and used), playing cards, Kleenex, fast-food napkins, Post-its, boarding passes, tarot cards, and actual bookmarks. We call the people who leave the photos, then we throw out the trash and put the actual bookmarks in a drawer so that when people say, "Do you have any bookmarks?" we can fan out a splendid array of miscellany.

So I had to re-do the first "bring your own weather to the picnic" drawing because it turned out that the person who asked for it wanted fancy lettering and not necessarily a smug cat and a confused owl. She would have been fine with the animals, but she didn't ask for animals, so I took it as an opportunity to acknowledge the terrible flaws in my reading comprehension and I drew anew.

THEN I came face to face with a drawing that would include John Hodgman and Maria Bamford. WELL, that is surely a test of my fledgling person-drawing abilities and I had to do a lot of erasing. I was sitting in my car killing time before my optometrist appointment and now my floor mats are covered in little pink eraser shreds. I'm pretty sure this is going to get a do-over as well, but I might as well post my failures here as well as my successes, for they are both humbling and entertaining.

I have this idea that Maria Bamford might be a little phone phobic so she makes one of her pugs answer the phone, although I'm not sure why John Hodgman wouldn't know the difference between the sound of a ringing phone and a bunch of wet snuffling noises. This whole concept needs some work.

The picture frames I ordered finally came so I'm sending out more drawings tomorrow, but the hardest one to let go of has been this guy:

I really wanted to keep him. I asked Jack what I should do.

"Keep it and draw another one to send out," he said. I don't know if you know that Jack is a painter, and he understands that sometimes you don't want to give away your loved ones so instead you charge a shitload of money for them. But that was not an option. However, before I put my sheep friends in an envelope I drew a copy of them!

Which didn't look quite right. The sheep's head was too big and the sheep dog was stumpy.

I made another one!

Which still didn't look quite right. The sheep's head is misshapen but now I am on a roll and may end up copying this particular scenario exclusively from here on out. This could cause a lot of confusion, I realize. You asked for dinosaurs, you get sheep. You asked for a tree? You get sheep. California landscape? California landscape with SHEEP.